Google Docs as an editing tool

[grapesmoker]

You can now open Word documents in Google and invite individual people to edit them. This sounds like an ideal platform for multiple-person question editing. What do people think about this?

edit: we could also use it as a question storage database.

[ValenciaQBowl]

Jonathan Magin is leading the lit singles writing for CO using the Google database, and I'd say it's working very well for us. We can edit each others' work and/or make comments below questions to help in revision. Fortunately Jonathan is tech savvy (or at least more so than I), so he's saved the document from the couple times I've somehow managed to fill it with tildes and ampersands.

[First Chairman]

Thanks for the heads-up. Is there any way to password-protect it or restrict access in anyway?

[Mike Bentley]

We use a private wiki I set up to edit most of our tournaments. That works pretty well. Although I'll have to check out Google Docs to see if it does what we want to do better.

[magin]

Yeah, it's working very well so far. Of course, it's a good idea to copy the Google document into Word now and then. Also, Dave Letzler is the one who came up with the idea, not me.

Google documents also have the highly useful feature of saving every single time someone makes a change to the document, which makes it very easy to correct things that would ordinarily be time-consuming to fix (like the aforementioned ampersands and tildes problem).

[QuizbowlPostmodernist]

Thanks for the heads-up. Is there any way to password-protect it or restrict access in anyway?

Yes, you can restrict people to a read-only access or permission to edit. All you need is a Google account, which I have discovered not everyone has.

You can also draft documents and publish to a blog or as a webpage. I used the former to put TRASHionals stats on the TRASH blog and almost used the latter option.

It also warns you if someone is making edits to a document at the same time that you are.